Updated September 13, 2022 at 6:03 PM ET
Kenneth Starr, the one-time federal prosecutor who led the Whitewater investigation into Bill and Hillary Clinton during the 1990s, died Tuesday, his family said. He was 76.
Born in small-town Texas in 1946, Starr entered the world of Beltway law soon after finishing law school at Duke University. He clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger in the 1970s, then in 1983, hewas appointed to a federal judgeship under the Reagan administration. He later served as solicitor general under President George H.W. Bush.
Starr became a fixture in national headlines in the 1990s, aftera three-judge panel appointed him to lead an investigation into real estate investments made by the Clintons during the years that Bill Clinton was building his political career in Arkansas.
As independent counsel, Starr was granted expansive investigative powers. The scope of the investigation grew far beyond the original inquiry into the Whitewater real estate deal.
Although the Clintons themselves were never charged, Starr’s inquiry loomed for years over the administration. Starr investigated the death of a White House attorney, the firing of White House travel agents and the potential mishandling of FBI files.
Eventually, Starr’s investigation came to encompass Clinton’s conduct as the defendant in a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by an Arkansas government employee named Paula Jones, who accused Clinton of misconduct during his time as governor of Arkansas.
As part of that investigation, Starr’s spotlight turned to Clinton’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, and the president’s testimony in a sworn deposition about his conduct with her.
Starr’s 445-page report about the case, delivered to Congress in 1998, laid out 11 possible grounds for impeachment, including perjury, obstruction of justice and abuse of power. The report ultimately led to Clinton’s impeachment, though the president was acquitted by the Senate and served out the remainder of his term.
Later, Starr expressed that he regretted the turn his investigation took. “I deeply regret that I took on the Lewinsky phase of the investigation. But at the same time, as I still see it twenty years later, there was no practical alternative to my doing so,” he wrote in his 2018 memoir Contempt: A Memoir of the Clinton Investigation.
Later, Starr served as president and chancellor of Baylor University in Waco, Texas. He resigned in 2016 after an investigation revealed that the school had mishandled allegations of sexual assault involving the football team.
In 2020, Starr joined then-President Donald Trump’s defense team for his Senate impeachment trial.
Starr died Tuesday at a Houston hospital of complications from surgery, his family said in a statement.
“We are deeply saddened with the loss of our dear and loving Father and Grandfather, whom we admired for his prodigious work ethic, but who always put his family first,” his son, Randall Starr, said in the statement.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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